i’ve been spending the past few days going through my notes in my iOS Notes app- it once had over 1000 notes, and i’ve been chipping away at them until as of now they’re under 400. and i’m hoping to further reduce it to under 300, 200, and hopefully even under 100, that would be amazing.
a lot of the notes in my iOS app are scattered fragments of thoughts, observations, intentions, etc. i find even the no-longer-relevant ones interesting, but i dont need them cluttering up my thinkspace.
sidenote: I noticed recently that, in my shower, the soap dispenser that i use the most was in a slightly inaccessible location compared to the other bottles. it had been like that for months. once i noticed it, i decided to move it to the most accessible spot, which is decidedly more ergonomic. but funnily, i keep reaching for where it used to be. behavior change is hard even when the behavior you’re changing it to is something that’s ‘objectively better’.
nonetheless, i’ve been on a bit of a streak with this. i’ve been looking around my house and asking myself what things are most visible, what things are most accessible, how can i make things more ergonomic for myself? or in christopher alexander’s phrasing, how can I make myself more comfortable? and this is something that’s becoming more of a ritual and a practice for me. while typing this i realized that i wasn’t actually sitting in a very comfortable position, and so i’ve made a few adjustments– i’m in bed, the pillow behind my back. my legs were on the crumpled blanket, I moved that aside. “make yourself comfortable” is such an inviting ethos. now i’m looking at my tabs, what can I close? basically everything else. done. my bookmarks tab is also a bit of a distraction, closed that too. wew, this feels good! now i’m noticing there’s stuff on this computer’s desktop i haven’t looked at in a while… let’s tidy that up real quick… not perfect but it does always feel good to just touch some things. moving this browser back to strategically cover most of the mess.
anyway. lets talk about the notes? i have a substack essay in the works about the notes. currently there are 22 folders in my notes app. that’s too many folders. i shouldn’t have more than 12 folders. if i collapse the folders that have other folders in them, that reduces things down to 10 folders, which feels much better– but I personally know that there are 12 more folders inside the 10, so i can’t quite enjoy the relief fully.
i merged a bunch of the notes into google docs. there are about 10+ such docs, containing the combinations of about 300 notes. i feel a relief that they’re reorganized that way.
i guess most of this wordvomit has just been me wanting to make a note about my notes cleanup, lol. i do feel like there’s a deeper emotional and almost spiritual component to get to. which is that i’ve been holding on to a lot of these notes in their current form for YEARS. some of these go back to 2018. ever since i left my job. there’s some older stuff too albeit migrated from somewhere else to here. i basically have been dumping stuff in here for years thinking “future visa will get to it”. well I am that future visa now. and i am getting to it. which feels profound in some ways, transformational in some ways. it’s maybe a bit premature to talk about this but i can feel things shifting. and it’s kind of funny how much… emotionally invested i am with all my stuff? but I do know why that is the case, and i have a substack draft on this topic, about the pain/frustration, maybe even trauma, of having lost old material that meant a lot to me. i’m thinking now about a couple of friends i have who lost their home and all their belongings in a fire, and how much worse that must be. but there’s always someone who has it worse, that doesn’t mean that your pain isn’t real.
im looking at a 2017 google sheet i have with 500 bookmarks in it. i could just delete them all. but i want to revisit them. i want to make art out of it. i’ve had this intent/desire for a long time, but i was always tied up… i chose to write two ebooks first, and now htat those things are done i’ve been spending the last two years trying to write essays but mostly struggling… struggling maybe because there’s a part of me that feels like i have to process this stuff first, so that the stuff can come through in the essays… for a while i agonized over it, but i think now i’ve sort of made my peace with it? wait lets check when my last substack post was… it was on the 5th of may. today is the 16th of june. i definitely want to make sure i ship at least one post a month. i’d like a faster cadence like once a week or even every 3 days, but i think i basically have like this cognitive/emotional technical debt that’s keeping me from doing that right now. when i’m ready i know it will just pour out of me, as my writing has done in the past.
so yeah that’s the question. what are the blockers? it’s that i feel knotted in all my old intentions. i want to do them justice, i want to weave them into my work. for now i’m going to focus on continuing to process my 393 remaining iOS notes. then I might move on to google drive and Roam. somewhere in the middle i might publish a wordvomit. it’s all a little messy right now and i’m tired but happily tired, relieved in witnessing some sense of progress at last. we’ll see